ABSTRACT
Christian’s accomplishment was quite remarkable, if you think about it. Imagine yourself suddenly placed in a land where no one has ever heard English and whose inhabitants speak ‘Yakish’, a language both utterly unknown to you and not remotely similar to any language that you do know. Your task is to become a competent and confident speaker of Yakish. You must learn the correct form for making positive and negative statements, asking questions and making requests. You have to be able to describe people and things and talk about past, present and future events according to the rules of Yakish. In addition, you must be able to understand the meanings of at least 10,000 individual words in this language and be able to pronounce the words you use with a ‘native accent’. Hearing Yakish and trying to speak it yourself are the only tools at your disposal. You cannot write anything down, use a tape-recorder, consult a book or hire a teacher. You have a little less than five years in which to do all this. If you want to, you can spend all your free time and energy on the task. Unlike the small child, you already know how to feed and dress yourself, and you do not have to bother with minor tasks
like learning to walk or finding out how the world works while you are tackling the language.
